In this paper, I would like to approach the question of language as crucial for the difference between human and non-human animals in the scenario cast by contemporary continental philosophy. I would also like to use this and other topics as a chance to take some general considerations on postmodernity into account, the latter intended as the historical condition in which we are supposed to live.

Postmodernity can be defined as the age in which all the so-called “big-picture” narrations, as far as they are grounded in some metaphysical theory, are declared to be finished. The age in which human speech has been set free from any reference to a unitary framework and a metaphysical Truth (with a capital “T”) and thus assigned to pluralism and tolerance. Perspectivism and pluralism in the theory of knowledge has led to a new communicative dimension in which anyone has the right to propose – and eventually submit to a discussion ruled by looser criteria – his versioln of things. The world opened by postmodenity is intended to be a richer one, a world in which anyone can talk. To attain this condition, the thoughts of postmodernity make explicit reference to contemporary thinkers who have promoted the so-called “destruction” of the metaphysical tradition. By merging instances coming from many different theories and areas of philosophy, those thinkers who endorse the idea of a postmodern approach to the history of philosophy feel legitimate in concluding that the basic concepts of metaphysics have finally ceased to work productively in our cultural background. Despite their claim to express the eternal and fundamental value of knowledge and ethics, concepts such as Truth, Absolute and Transcendence reveal themselves as historically conditioned, as products of some historical framework, and thus lose their ability to give some unitary sense to the bundle of our experiences.

If one should thus mention only one keyword as representative of the postmodern condition, I would say that this could only be the acknowledgment of the idea of historical finiteness as the basic coordinate of any form of thinking and experience. Whether we perceive it as a limiting or tragic condition, explore its possibilities with a feeling of relief, or celebrate it with a sort of narcissistic attitude, there can be no doubt that the acceptance of historical finiteness as a basic and insurmountable condition plays a key role in our existential, theoretical and even scientific approach to life. Precisely this acceptance is the way we can get rid of obsolete presuppositions, authorities and theories. So the acceptance of the finiteness should set speech free. This means: to set speech free from any rule which should be prescribed to language “from the outside” or “from above”. Whereas human language is conceived of as a system of rules that emerge through language itself and can be replaced as topics and players change. It is thus no coincidence that many representatives of this idea prefer to speak about philosophy in terms of a sort of global “conversation”.

So the abandonment of transcendence and the endorsement of finiteness should leave room for speech as a dimension one can enter to claim some rights, to demand his proper place in the global conversation. In the postmodern age, anyone should legitimately be able to take part in the construction of the world as a both a linguistic and historical product. So the possibility of being “someone”, of being free from authority and indisputable presuppositions, seems to be deeply rooted in the ability to take part in speech and conversation. To enter the global conversation means thus to have the ability and the will to talk. This means that something like a human being is defined by its linguistic condition. That the very identity of a human being –be it a single man, a particular aspect of a single man, or even a group of men or a population – is connected with the ability and the will to make some use of language. This connects the notion of identity with the notion of linguistic responsibility in more than a casual way.

As contemporary philosophy has clearly shown, the Western philosophical tradition has played with this idea and, in the main, come to a sort of ontological bond between personal identity and responsible use of language. One is recognised as a legal person insofar as one can claim to speak and answer “for himself”, insofar as one is “responsible”. In modern philosophy since Descartes, the idea of personal responsibility emerges as a result of the possibility of the I-function (the ego cogito) being ontologically independent and self-grounded. The linguistic ability to say “I” – that is: to be conscious of all experiences that can be unified around an identical pole like a “person” or a “subject” – is thus the condition to be given ontological status and recognition, which means: to be able to claim rights for oneself and respond to one’s own actions.

The range of this idea is so wide that it has determined Western philosophical tradition despite any transition between the ages. Even within those perspectives that aimed at destroying or deconstructing the concept of personal identity as the ontological basis for the foundation of knowledge and ethics, the central role of language for the definition of the human life has never been put into question. And even those thinkers who worked intensively to deconstruct human subjectivity by showing it as structurally exposed to and determined by other forces, maintain language (its possible use) as the crucial feature to be analysed in order to realise this programme.

Heidegger’s Destruction

Heidegger’s philosophical project in the years around his masterpiece, Being and Time, is aimed at destructing human subjectivity in the traditional sense. In Heidegger’s jargon, “destruction” (Abbau, Destruktion) means something very specific, i.e. to bring back human subjectivity as it expresses itself in theoretical and epistemic attitude, to the living forces that determine it originally. The first step of this enterprise is to define the concept of “factual life” (Faktizität) as presupposed to any theoretical level by taking inspiration from the continuity of the life-forms described by Aristotle in many passages of his corpus.

Heidegger’s appropriation of Aristotle’s treatment of life takes place most intensively in the years 1921 to 1926 and culminates in the 1924 course, Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy[1]. In this course, Heidegger tries to establish a strong connection between high epistemic functions such as speech and intellect and the basic forms of animal life. The result is that concepts and logical forms seem to be deeply rooted in the way an animal embodies the original dynamic of “life”. Emotions, desires, passions and affects are the ground upon which every animal makes its life significant. The affects – says Heidegger – are not mental states, but refer to the disposition of the living in his world, how he stands towards something, how he lets something affect or concern him. This ability to be emotionally situated towards something in the world (in German: Befindlichkeit) is presented as a fundamental structure of living beings themselves and seems to belong to any being endowed with perception. It refers to the fact that a living being always finds itself pleasantly or unpleasantly disposed toward what it perceives in the world. Desire, perception and appetite belong thus to the most primitive animals, as well as some kinds of representations of pleasure and pain.

So, it is life in general which is characterised as the movement of desire, or, in Heidegger’s language, the movement of care: an emotionally oriented intentionality which specifies every form of life. But, as Aristotle had already shown, there are animals that specify this basic level via interaction with other members of the species and because of the necessity of elaborating common strategies in order to survive and to reproduce. According to this logic: to communicate the content of some emotion, to attract other members toward something pleasant or to warn them from something unpleasant or dangerous. This gives birth to language as we know it, i.e. as a social phenomenon which is possible only on the basis of associated life. So the basic level of language as a feature of animal life is the level of communication in terms of a social disposition. “Meaning” emerges thus as the basic structure of animal life as determined by language before any possible development of it in terms of statements, categories, concepts or logical forms. This gives birth to the primary emerging of a “world” before its establishing in a “notion” or a “concept”[2]. As Heidegger says: “Life” refers to a mode of being, indeed a mode of being-in-a-world. A living thing is not simply at hand, but is in a world in that it has its world. An animal is not simply moving down the road, pushed by some mechanism. It is in the world in the sense of having it. So, the analysis of animal life shows how much the structure of life as determined by meaning and intentionality is that of an “association”, a community. Language does not emerge as a means of communication among isolated subjects, but as a structure grounded upon the necessity to take orientation towards something which appears as originally framed in the mutual representation of the environment. This ability to share meaning and representations is what we call life in terms of being-in-the-world. Out of this basic level, the difference between the primitive form of language and the human one also emerges:

Enticing means to bring another animal into the same disposition; warning is the repelling from this same disposition. Enticing and warning as repelling and bringing, in themselves, have in their ground being-with-one-another. Enticing and warning already show that animals are with one another. Beingwith-one-another becomes manifest precisely in the specific being-character of animals as φωνή. It is neither exhibited nor manifested that something as such is there. Animals do not subsequently come along to ascertain that something is at hand; they only indicate it within the orbit of their animalistic having-todo. Since animals indicate the threatening, or alarming, and so on, they signal, in this indicating of the being-there of the world, their being in the world. The world is indicated as ἡδύ and, at the same time, it is a signaling of being, being threatened, having-found, and so on[3].

This difference implies that every “animal” world stay in some kind of connection with each other, but only insofar as they are significant according to the pleasure-pain dynamics of each environment. Human language, however, seems to have other specifications. So the way in which non-human animals are in the world may be called existential insofar as the main basic structures of factual life are at work in that meaningful having-to-do with an environment[4]. This means: exactly like in Aristotle, that the highest forms of life seem to emerge as particular specifications of the very same basic structure. Animal life as generally described by Heidegger in 1924 is the basis out of which a genuine existence – to speak in the language of Being and Time – can develop itself. This also means – and what concerns Heidegger most of all – that what we call “conceptuality” (Begrifflichkeit) is neither autonomous nor original, rather it is deeply grounded upon (and also rooted in) the basic forms of animal life in general. A deep continuity specifies animal life as a meaningful oriented existence, as something determined by sense, language, intentionality and representation even at its lowest levels. Very far from that kind of biologism and mechanicism Heidegger intended to oppose in those years.

On the other hand, the relationship an animal has to his world changes according to the different capabilities that emerge out of the ones shared by every species. So the peculiarity of animal life as embodied by human beings is a result of the particular capabilities that specify human beings. The main and most important is that form of social communication out of which analysis we can discover the other forms as something not entirely developed: logos. The peculiarity of this kind of communicative (and social) form of language is to allow the formation of meanings that are not necessarily connected with a strategy or an operative behavior. The most important feature of human logos is to make something meaningful by representing in abstracto the totality of its features (essence) and of the possible connections that can link it to other sources of stimulus. Logos makes something meaningful by putting a perceived thing in connection (symploke) with something else. In human logos we experience the world by representing something as something else, or better: by interpreting (hermenuein) something as (als) something else. We can interpret a flat stone as a surface upon which one can sit, stand, eat or cut because of the fact that we frame that connection into a net of possible connections ruled by our social experience of the world according to a need we have to fulfill. Something appears as meaningful, i.e., useful for an operation, only within a totality of plausible possibilities of connection which lies in the background. Things we perceive and whose representations we elaborate are always perceived and elaborated out of a totality of possible meanings (the totality of language) which we have simply inherited, not created. This totality precedes us and determines us as speaking animals in a way that is irreducible to other forms of life. This is the reason we can also frame and interpret the other forms of life as something related to ours not only according to the pain-pleasure dynamic. We have – says Heidegger –uniquely as animals, the possibilities of letting something “be”, of considering something in a pure relationship with itself. We are the only animals upon the earth capable of objectivity, ontology and metaphysics.

It so seems indisputable that in Heidegger men only have the possibility of reading other forms of animal life as part of a totality that includes everything, whereas the encirclements of meaning in which other species live can get in touch only according to the primitive dynamic of pain-pleasure. Animal worlds (or environments) are not liable to touch each other ontologically, i.e.: to recognise each other in terms of letting something else simply “be”. According to Heidegger, animals simply do not see (i.e. do not confer any meaning to) things in their world that are, according to the pain-pleasure dynamic, simply indifferent, that do not play any role (either positive or negative) in their strategy of survival. Whereas “objectivity” means to see something as determined and meaningful only by its features, and not by the use we can make of it. Animals do not need to go through the totality of things to experience something; neither do they need to address something in respect of features that are not useful (or dangerous) for their life. They are – according to Aristotle – incapable of theorein, of simply looking-at, of a look not led by instrumentality.

But this opinion also places Heidegger’s perspective in a strange and twofold situation. If only men are capable of existence in an ontological sense, i.e. by addressing something in itself, in its being, this also means that, due to the continuity of life-forms, human beings do live in the highest conceivable form, so being at the top of an existential scala naturae. Only human beings do technically exist because they experience life in the completeness of its coordinates, including death. This is precisely one of the most controversial points of the discussion Heidegger carries out in the 1929/30 course, The fundamental concepts of metaphysics: World, Finiteness, Solitude[5]. Technically speaking, only human beings die. All the other animals simply cease to live. But “to die” means something radically different.

Because of their attitude to objectivity, i.e. to the ability to represent something as determined by itself and not by an individual look or perspective, human beings can die. Only human beings can represent their death, i.e. represent their own life without themselves, represent life as something which continues without that single human being. According to Heidegger, “to die” in an existential sense means: to be able to carry out one’s own life by representing death as its extreme possibility, by including the surviving of life in general in one’s own existential project. This is what Heidegger calls “being finite”. To be determined by a closure, by the impossibility of experiencing one’s own death and by the awareness of this fact as the crucial one which rules and determines our existential projects. All other animals do have limits, but are not finite. So, exactly as man’s life holds a different rank in the universal continuity of life, even man’s death can be something more than a return to the world of bare matter. Only human animals can face death as the extreme possibility of life, i.e. as the possibility which determines all the others that constitute the human world. This also explains why nonhuman animals are declared incapable of experiencing a sense of otherness, and, consequently, of being-with-another in general. But this also connects human ability of logos with the capability to become political. In short terms: to experience life not only as a meaningful structure (zoe), but also as ontologically exposed life (bios). An associated life-form which operates on the basis of the inclusion of personal death into its own limits and rules.

But if only human beings can die (so being both metaphysical and political), this also means that, as it probably happens even in our usual perception, only a human being can technically be “killed”. Exactly as well as only a human animal can be charged (for the time being, at least) to have killed another (human) animal. This also explains why, in the ordinary feeling, a dead human body deserves more respect than a simple animal carcass, being capable to be honored by a funeral, a burial, or some other kind of ritual preservation. At closer look, this happens because in the screaming of a dying man echoes the possibility of logos, or better: the possibility of its violent privation as something nonhuman and unjustifiable. Whereas in the screaming of a dying animal resounds only another signal: a mere note of pain and warning addressed to the other members of its limited world.

The current debate

Heidegger’s ambiguous attitude towards animal life, as expressed in the 1924 and 1929 courses, has been the starting point of many discussions from Jacques Derrida[6] to Giorgio Agamben[7] and more[8]. Heidegger’s view was the chance for Jacques Derrida to trace back a common line of thinking which connects the most influential philosophers of the Western tradition, including those we’ve analysed above:

In spite of the immense differences and contradictions that separate them, which I would be the last to want to minimize […] Heidegger, Levinas, and Lacan share, vis-à-vis what they call ‘‘the animal’’, a considerable number of what I’ll call ‘‘beliefs,’’ which, if you prefer, you might name axioms, prejudices, presumptions, or presuppositions. In any case I would like to show that they, like Descartes, think that in contrast to us humans – a difference that is determined by this fact – the animal neither speaks nor responds, that its capacity to produce signs is foreign to language and limited or fixed by a program. Not one of them has ever taken into account the essential or structural differences among animal species. Not one of them has taken into account, in a serious and determinate manner, the fact that we hunt, kill, exterminate, eat, and sacrifice animals, use them, make them work or submit them to experiments that are forbidden to be carried out on humans. Apart from Lacan – but this, however, in no way changes the traditional axiomatics of his work – not one of them takes into account animal sexuality. Not one of them really integrates progress in ethological or primatological knowledge into his work[9].

But most of all, the interpretations we’ve focused upon operate within a strange paradox: they claim to ground the destruction of traditional subjectivity and to remove the sovereignty of the human being upon a new evaluation of dimensions like Otherness (Lacan, Levinas) and Difference (Heidegger). But, rather, they let this dimension play only into the finite horizon of man’s relationship with the elements of his environments, with his world. This brings Derrida to the striking conclusions that even what we may call a positive or tolerant attitude of human beings towards “animals” (so improperly called) is the expression of the same anthropomorphism. The will to recognise animals as “persons” or even “legal persons” is grounded upon the idea that only human beings have the right to concede rights to other forms of life and only insofar as the latter seem to bear human or quasi-human features like emotions, the capacity to suffer, cognitive abilities and so on. The sovereign ability of human language is so wide that we are able to let other forms of life “speak”, i.e. to give word to silent things, to speak “for” whoever is not capable of speaking for himself. So it’s the same logic which moves us to concede rights to partially speaking people such as children, disabled people, outsiders and – why not? – animals. It only depends on the range we assign to our language ability. What Derrida denounces is that the notions of difference and otherness that rule over our approach to the animal world are not radical enough. As long as they are intended from an anthropomorphic perspective, they are still dependent on the identity of a subject that bears the trait of the divided psyche (Lacan), the ethical subject (Lacan) or the being-there [Dasein] (Heidegger). In affirming its supremacy over other forms of life, this new kind of subject does not destroy the traditional idea of subjectivity but only replaces it.

What Derrida unfortunately left only as a hint towards a positive approach to the question was more recently developed by a series of studies whose programme is to make an explicit difference between such problematics as the question of “Animal Rights” and “Animal Studies” in general and a radically new approach which should be possible towards the question of animality in general[10]. In these perspectives

“animality” means a life that extends itself beyond the taxonomic boundaries Biology or Geology have fixed. Therefore, an animality event can be something which is not living. There is animality each time a life in this wider sense appears which is not forced into the limits of our classifications; a life which runs away from all sides; a life which is not worried by our ontological concerns[11].

The most interesting point in this perspective is that it gains its consistence from the idea that animality is something that should not be overcome but, rather, genuinely appropriated again:

“Animality” means a life that completely and radically coincides with itself. On the contrary, since actual human life is completely detached from the immediacy of the body, there is no animality in human life. Human life is a zoological life without animality. Homo sapiens is human only because s/he does not know her/his own animality[12].

And so apt to extended to every forms of “life” in the broadest sense:

And it is also something that can and should be extended to other forms of subsistence, insofar as these are grounded upon a bodily constitution. Animality is a life that simply lives the life it is actually living. From this point of view, animality is not restricted to animals or plants; a stone either stays where it happens to stay. Animality does not look for something else; it already is. Animality is not motionless, because it favours the intrinsic movement of life. In this sense, animality coincides with immanence[13].

All these new tendencies thus place themselves in explicit or implicit opposition to the postmodernist focus on the key role played by human language and human finiteness. This culminates in Giorgio Agamben’s opinion, according to which philosophers like Heidegger “strove to separate man from the living being” so re-establishing the very same “anthropogenic machine” that specified modernity[14].

Conclusion

Under this respect, the very notion of postmodernity seems to be a paradox, because – despite any contrary announcement – the modern age did not simply cease to be but has, rather, settled again, although in a renewed version. So, it can be argued that such a cultural framework, like the overcoming of modernity, has ever been effectively at work. And one can conclude by saying that what still needs to be overcome is the idea of a man who refuses to let go of his sovereign role, even in that narcissistically deconstructed version which has determined his image over the past century.

[10] Among the various (and costantly increasing in number) tendencies that could be briefly quoted as paradigmatic of the current scenario: Animality Studies: an emerging interdisciplinary academic field focused on the cultural study of animals and animality. It can be distinguished from animal studies and critical animal studies by its resistance to animal rights or animal welfare as an explicit justification for work in this field (Lundblaud, 2002); Zoography: a perspective developed by Matthew Calarco (Calarco, 2008) who is opposed to Heidegger and Derrida’s notion of difference: the idea of a radical indistinction which rules over any form of animal life, insofar as what specifies life in general is bodily and fleshy constitution; Philosophy of animality: a perspective recently developed by the Italian philosopher of language and psychologist, Felice Cimatti (Cimatti, 2013).

AbstractObjective of this paper is to indicate inadequate general theoretical approach to the perception of evil, which in return contributes to the permanence of “evil in the world”. Analysis will focus on the logially imprecisely adopted and observed anthropocentric and romantic relation between good and evil through debatable pairs of notions such as virtue–sin, heaven– hell, white–black et cetera. I will lay out concepts that interpret evil as a priori psychic and epistemic phenomenon producing moral issues by the transmutation via mentioned pairs. It appears in the framework of social (political) community as the ratio of the energy of “openness” and “closeness”. With this pair I replace all the traditional pairs, and I further describe it on the grounds of the analysis of narcissism. I understand narcissism as being one of the results of the lack of knowledge potentiated by fury and fear in the relation to the self. It prevents us from knowing All-Oneness, a mereological principle that takes into consideration the entire biotic community. Expected contribution consists of pointing at the methods for the reduction of evil in the world.

Historically and philosophically captivating, the problem of evil is one of the most discussed topics to date, but strangely enough, also a permanent taboo. And while its aporia of crime and punishment in this world or in the aftermath is certainly symbolically bewitching, I claim that categories playing the role in understanding of this aporia are not adequately precise, thus our use of these categories is nihilating the potentiality of nullifying the level of normality present in our moral reflection regarding existence of evil. In this paper, I will tackle the categories exclusively, avoiding case studies of particular crimes throughout the history for two reasons: because their quantity is endless and their existence apparent, and because I believe we will have a better use of this study if analysing the categorical causality behind the crimes will be its telos. Moreover, this paper has an intention to be a propaedeutics to studying All-Oneness,[1] that is, to studying the psyche as the dialectical synthetic force within the sphere of living beings. To make my case clearer, consider Svendsen’s observation:

[…] the idea of evil was seen as a holdover from a mythical, Christian worldview whose time was already past. Initially, as I began to attempt this ‘rehabilitation’ of the concept of evil, the idea itself was still an object of fascination for me. This fascination was a result, most especially, of our tendency to regard evil as an aesthetic object, where evil appears as something other and therefore functions as an alternative to the banality of everyday life. We are steadily exposed to more and more extreme representations of evil in films and such, but this form of evil doesn’t belong to a moral category. Like most other things in our culture, evil has been aestheticized.[2]

Although I agree with the argument Svendsen made regarding perception of evil as being shifted into the domain of aesthetics, I cannot agree with him that aesthetics is the context from which we should draw our answers from. My question would be – why aesthetics? – and I would look for the answer in the causality anterior to aesthetical dimension of the phenomena. In my attempt to clarify the issues regarding the problem of evil, in focus of this paper I will discuss in parallel the micro-level of evil-doing in the psyche of the individual, and meso-level of evil-doing within society, while macro-level of this discussion will be indirectly implied as the mereological co-bearing of the All-Oneness. Mereology is a mathematical discipline which studies the relation of parts and the wholes they form. Here I draw from the general idea the concept of the mereology of community (society) because of its heuristic power, the ability to grasp the complexity of contexts, that is, of particular constellations building next levels of the whole. In a different context but similar sense, Matjaž Potrč concluded the following:

Thus far we claimed that the science of wholes and parts, that is mereology, is fundamental for phenomena. In Greek, meros means a part. Mereology is fundamental for the study of phenomena, that is, phenomenology. Phenomena is crucial for the study of ways in which the whole appears.[3]

However, prior to any viable discussion in the given context, there are terminological and methodological issues that need to be addressed.

Consistency of the permanence of evil in the world influenced me to believe that there is something misleading in moral(izing) interpretations of the evildoing. The historical situation continues to lead us to falsely believe that the existence of evil in the world is normal, even necessary. I claim that there is something one-dimensional in the general approach to the problem, in the way in which interpretations fail to contribute to the process of overcoming the conflicted state of the world. The problem with the way in which we think about the evil-doing is related to the way in which interpretations remain consistent with the terminological structure of the notion of moral, from the latin moralis, having a litteral meaning of “pertaining to …”. Similar connotation is present in the German version Sittlichkeit, in Croatian translated as “običajnost”, both referring to the expected structured order of manners or character. All of them semantically disclose sedentarism, “being sitted-in” or “inseatedness”. It implies passivity, it manifests dreamy inseatedness of the moral immutability which influences not just actions per se, but thinking about these actions. This leads us to another general problem with the analysis of evil, mainly the fact that we are too strongly focused on physical act of evil. We revolve around the terms such as “misconduct”, “atrocity”, “felony”, and “crime”, but this “evil-doing” is but an outcome of the “evil-bearing”. Genesis of evil begins in the thoughts of beings, and, before any physical act performed upon others, it firstly manifests itself through speech. Of course, any speech act is surely physical, but that misses the point: poisonous edge to evil occurs in the initial transfer – in the thinking itself and in the communication between beings, most precisely – in the psyche of beings, which is the true carrier of the potentiality to do evil and to be evil. In fact, evil can be performed by not doing anything concrete, as Arendt implies through quoting Augustine of Hippo:

The man who, knowing the right, fails to do it, loses the power to know what is right; and the man who, having the power to do right, is unwilling, loses the power to do what he wills.[4]

In classical terms of understanding evil, this is not something to be understood as evil – and that is precisely the problem because this is how evil is “born”. Thus, before any discussion on morally problematic acts, we need to address the a priori epistemic – psychic – ground, which genealogically predates moral act, that is, constitutes moral reasoning. There is an element of learning involved with committing evil acts, a person learns about making herself the goal of any deed, including causing harm to others, actions which lead to establishing oneself as the knowledge paradigm for doing good. Baudrillard made a similar case when he concluded the following:

Unintelligence of evil, absence of insight into things by evil and therefore always the same discourse on the ‘foul beast’ and the same naïveté in the analysis of present events. Our whole system of values excludes this predestination of evil. Yet all it has invented, at the end of its burdensome therapy on the human species, is another way of making it disappear, that is to say, of ironically carrying the possibility of happiness to its opposite term, that of the perfect crime, that of integral misfortune, which was somehow waiting for it just at the end.[5]

The necessity by which misleading occurs, the perception that the appearance of absolute evil will happen, is empowered by an intuition that human beings are evil by nature, whether we are “tainted by the first sin” or we behave as if “one human being is a wolf to another”. This kind of negative anthropology forces us to believe that we know ourselves as evil, and thus we orient ourselves only towards ourselves, giving birth to narcissism. A narcissist exhibits extreme selfishness and eventually fails to comprehend others as worthy on their own. She wants to be the subject of every situation, and attempts to be all the others who might challenge her agency, and thus works to mentally influence them to her bidding. Lacan describes an important aspect of narcissist in this way:

I suggest that there is a radical distinction between loving oneself through the other – which, in the narcissistic field of the object, allows no transcendence to the object included – and the circularity of the drive, in which the heterogeneity of the movement out and back shows a gap in its interval.[6]

Final outcome of this behaviour is the mereological collapse of the All-Oneness into a narcissist, into a singleton, who pseudo-logically behaves as if, and believes she is the All-Oneness. Narcissist encloses away the mereological richness of the totality of biotic and abiotic community, and because of this, narcissism can be considered the prime characteristic of human beings in general – as species. It is worthy to mention that the root meaning of narcissism – narke – means numbness, intoxication – and as such reflects our species as those who fell in love with themselves on account of the All-Oneness. Narcissism is the dominant opiate of our species, and was naively represented through psychology and psychiatry as a matter of individual cases, an anomaly.[7] Narcissism plays a central role as a specific “meta-magnet” attracting numbness, greed, and moral relativism, it is a “mereological fissure” preventing us from attaining contextual unity beyond the unity of ourselves, while against it plays the disposition of thinking about others as a reflection of the All-Oneness we are a part of. Clearly, history showed us that by simply establishing a social contract we did not get far in solving the problem of permanence of evil. I believe that we can overcome these issues by thinking through the perspective of All-Oneness, yet only if we observe evil as the antithesis to the All-Oneness, and think of it as the absolute narcissism preventing the perception of the mereological eccentric positionality through the judgment of the energy ratio of openness and closeness.[8] This is my first hypothesis, and by it I suggest to consider understanding interrelations within society as a “domain of energy” made of “atoms” in everlasting interactive movement. Harmony between the “atoms” is maintained by the energy of openness (the Good), while aporetic limitations and disorder are maintained by the energy of closeness (the Evil). What is required is the shift in the perspective, the clarification of the new form of the understanding of eccentric positionality (Plessner) as the continual transcending of the n-positions in which we are not subjects of anything, but pure predicates in relation to other “atoms” of community which we perceive as subjects. This subversion of the role of subject and object allows us to invest our energy of openness into prosperity for other members of the community who similarly strive to their telos, in return they do the same for us. On the micro-level, the relation between the two energies produces either stabile psyche of the individuals and a positive internal relation to oneself, or it produces “knots of energy” breeding anguish of ire, bitterness, and fear.[9] From the perspective of practical solutions to the disorder, we are dealing with certain circulus vitiosis which amplifies psychic entropy of living beings – the process of “setting-apart”, disharmonizing, depletion of openness into closeness. Jung explained the principle of entropy in the context of psyche in this way:

Principe of entropy is from our experience known only as the principle of partial processes that represent a relatively closed system. We can observe psyche as one such system. (…) Since only relatively closed systems are available to our experience, nowhere are we in a situation to be able to observe the absolute psychic entropy. However, the stronger is the enclosing of psychic system, the stronger is the proof for phenomenon of entropy. [Jung’s footnote 41 states the following: System is completely closed when outside input of energy is further not possible, only then entropy takes place] We can see this especially in cases of psychic disorders, characterized by the intense exclusion of outside world.[10]

This begins not with acts, but with talking and thinking, and the negative energy – manifestation of closeness in the sense of constructing enclosures in the meso-level network of “energy relays” of co-existence – has fertile ground in the psyche of living beings. This interrelation, and the corruption of All-Oneness, does not refer only to human beings – it refers to all living beings, to the fullness of the biosphere and beyond, as all of the living or non-living units are unavoidably members of the mereology of All-Oneness. The positive totality, the outwardity of openness phenomenon, suggests to us that there might be a qualitative difference between evil (closeness) and good (openness). More precisely, that closeness is a deviant post-effect of the complexity of interrelations of the ever-opened totality. This influences our way of thinking about the method for preventing evil. Augustine of Hippo understood this well:

But evils are so thoroughly overcome by good, that though they are permitted to exist, for the sake of demonstrating how the most righteous foresight of God can make a good use even of them, yet good can exist without evil, as in the true and supreme God Himself, and as in every invisible and visible celestial creature that exists above this murky atmosphere; but evil cannot exist without good, because the natures in which evil exists, in so far as they are natures, are good. And evil is removed, not by removing any nature, or part of a nature, which had been introduced by the evil, but by healing and correcting that which had been vitiated and depraved.[11]

The key moment of “healing” is, much as Augustine of Hippo did in his Confessions, communication. We should not be thinking about All-Oneness, openness and closeness as if they are pseudometaphysics of otherworldly, transcendent principles that imply static factuality, rather, both good and evil are dynamic communication of energy, a transfer of information from point A to point B. Evil occurs with closing of the information, with subjects communicating to themselves via others, instead of simply communicating to others in order to gain their own information, when behaving as if others are merely a subpoint of the absolute oneself in the mereology of relations. This type of behaviour is identifiable in most of the common evil-bearing acts: bullying the weaker, stealing, fraudulence, killing for pleasure or gain, falsifying history, truth or knowledge regarding e. g. god, taking advantage of the ill or disabled for gaining wealth et cetera. The problem is the level at which this type of behaviour occurs: it is the question not of the individuals, e.g. psychopaths, but of masses. They are governed by the intentional unconscious operating on the basis of intuited knowledge of the negative anthropology.[12] All of them are driven by sentiments of anger and fear orienting around substitution of All- Oneness for the self. Likewise, good occurs with opening the information, with being a point of progress for the whole and a gathering point for the particulars, with dedicating yourself to “midwifery”, to mereological maieutic: instead of bullying the weaker, you offer your back to support her growth, and you teach her how to offer her back to the weaker, because although mereological nature of the All-Oneness strongly suggests hierarchy, there is, in fact, nothing such to it. Kant writes:

The opposite of egoism can only be pluralism, that is, the way of thinking in which one is not concerned with oneself as the whole world, hut rather regards and conducts oneself as a mere citizen of the world.[13]

Finally, if evil can thus be understood as miscommunication, then we ought to dedicate our focus to the question of how knowledge is transferred and how does it “contribute” to the problems of psychic entropy. From slumber this wakens another problem which established itself in the past hundred years, which is a neglecting of the term psyche, and complete discoursive confusion of the terms “psyche”, “spirit”, “ghost”, “reason”, “mind”, “soul”, and “mental”. For example, in psychology psyche is understood as the totality of conscious and non-conscious content, while in institutional psychiatry a “psychic disorder” is just an organic brain disorder, that is, disorder of the reason, meaning that “psyche” is limited to the aspects of the brain, while neuroscientists often equate brain with “mind” without giving much thought. Firstly, the problem is with the presupposed understanding of psyche by which it is empirically observable. Already Heraclitus understood the depth of psyche, claiming in fr. 35 that you cannot find its limits,[14] which was something that Karl Jaspers outlined in the contemporary context:

We can comprehend and study only that which for us became an object. Yet soul as such is not an object. It becomes an object in a sense in which it appears perceivable within the world: in accompanying somatic occurrences, in understandable expression, in behaviour, in actions – moreforth, it manifests itself in language communication, speaks of what it means and thinks, produces work. In all these facts, which are demonstrable in the world, effects of soul are laid before us, occurrences in which we directly perceive the soul, or on the basis of which we deduce regarding the soul. The soul itself is not our subject [object]. We experience it in us as a conscious experience and visualize the experience of the Other, be it from the objective phenomena or from reports of our own experiences. But that experience is an occurrence, too. We may let the soul become objectified through pictures and parables. However, it remains to be the all-encompassing which does not become an object, but rather out of which the individual facts become objective.[15]

In more concrete sense, the problem occurs when we take a look at the use of these notions in the context of institutions: we have “mental” institutions, “psychic” institutions, “sanitariums”, “bedlams”, and “insane asylum”, accompanied with derogatory terms such as “nuthouse”, “funny farm”, and “madhouse”. In Croatian, a term “umobolnica”, literally meaning “hospital for mind” or “hospital for reason”, is occasionally still used “off the record”. The problem is the following: patients are treated, and diseases understood depending on the semantic context of the notions in use. Can my issues be cured with chemicals, or by social support and care, that depends on what notions endow our reasoning, and thus the probable damage of the extension of confusion regarding the way we think about phenomena is not measurable, but it can certainly be imagined and should not be ignored. Much like body serves to produce and convert substances into energy, so does psyche produce and covert “cognitive” phenomena, such as will or emotion, into acts. What would happen to the current practice if, for example, we would restore the Ancient Greek understanding of psyche which rejected dualism of mind and body that became popular during Middle Age and would certainly reject the concept of either soul or mind being equal to brain functioning? In fact, Greeks in many ways argued the opposite, and psyche was related to breathing, blowing, taking of space, was understood as the principle of vitality, as psukhē literally meaning “breath”, “life”, and “soul”. Democritus, for example, argued the following:

It is fitting for men that they should make a logos more about the soul than about the body. For the perfection of the soul puts right the faults of the body. But strength of body without reasoning improves the soul not one whit.” (B. 187)

While it is reported that Anaxagoras, differentiating between mind and psyche, instructed about the mind as follows:

He [Anaxagoras] has written the following about Nous: ‘The other things have a share of everything, but Nous is unlimited and self-ruling and has been mixed with no thing, but is alone itself by itself. For if it were not by itself, but had been mixed with anything else, then it would partake of all things, if it had been mixed with anything (for there is a share of everything in everything just as I have said before); and the things mixed together with it would thwart it, so that it would control none of the things in the way that it in fact does, being alone by itself. For it is the finest of all things and the purest, and indeed it maintains all discernment (gnōmē) about everything and has the greatest strength. And Nous has control over all things that have soul, both the larger and the smaller. And Nous controlled the whole revolution, so that it started to revolve in the beginning. First it began to revolve from a small region, but it is revolving yet more, and it will revolve still more. And Nous knew (egnō) them all: the things that are being mixed together, the things that are being separated off, and the things that are being dissociated. And whatever sorts of things were going to be, and whatever sorts were and now are not, and as many as are now and whatever sorts will be, all these Nous set in order. And Nous also ordered this revolution, in which the things being separated off now revolve, the stars and the sun and the moon and the air and the aether. This revolution caused them to separate off (…).’[16]

In Timaeus, Plato argues that “soul” consist of elements, emphasizing the importance of harmonizing the soul, because in the case of the opposite, when the power of the immortal part is not aligned with the power of the mortal part, human beings see the soul and body as if they are separated. This masks away the true power of life, and causes internal disorder within human beings.[17]

From only a selection, it is clear that their understanding implies broader mereological connection of elements that form the biotic and the abiotic. “Dance” between life and death, between kinetics and statics, between body and soul, outline the complexity precisely in the discussion about the psyche, appearing to be an entangling polygon of the before mentioned poles. It is here where the analogy between good and evil can be drawn through the scheme of openness and closeness. The source of these relations already begins in the field of unconscious, and it is the repeating that embodies it into a drive underlying both individuals and society as a particular whole. I suggest that we should think of psyche as the moving energy whose openness and closeness, and the issues that are in that sense produced, such as psychic disorders, are defined by internal and external influences ordained by the mereological relation of elements. My goal was to point out that “soul”, “mind”, “psyche” is neither separated from body, nor it is in any way isolated from the rest of the atomarium of All-Oneness. Psyche is the outcome of the dialectics of the totality of body and the totality of mind, the “actualis” of the mind and body potentiality, a grounding synthesis which reveals itself as the presence of being itself, the energy governing all internal and external acts. In the next chapter, I will thus more specifically focus on the conclusion that evil should be, thus, considered as a psychic disorder in the sense in which psyche was described up to this point, and that we will not be able to deal with it invasively, for example, with morality enhancement, advanced prison systems or exclusion punishment, rather, with bringing them into the light of All-Oneness through nurture and education. […]

[1] When I use the term All-Oneness, I refer to the conceptual and factual totality of biotic and abiotic community of cosmos. Similar concepts are present throughout the history of philosophy, from Heraclitus and Plotinus to Carl Gustav Jung, and they find support in the field of natural sciences, most notably in physics via discovery of the relation between elementary forces and the vacuum playing a constitutive role in the kinesis of the cosmos, but also in biology and chemistry in the context of evolutionary processes and self-organization of its internal movements. All-Oneness does not imply any type of anthropocentric god, it does not refer to one any being, rather, the notion implies the underlying unity within the totality, the unifying relations and the content of these relations between the aforementioned biotic and abiotic, but more specifically, between the physical and the mental or between the body and mind. It implies single unifying and unchanging truth, the kind Heraclitus spoke about, though not as “minervistic” records of the current, but as the creative, dynamical, and animating force. I think of it not as if it’s a state-like totalitarity drowning variety into undifferentiated blob, but as the unity of phenomenological n-pluriaspects governed by the category of organism.

[5] Jean Baudrillard, The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact, translated by Chris Turner, Berg, New York 2005, p. 174.

[6] Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book IV: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, translated by Alan Sheridan, W. W. Norton and Company, London 1998, p. 194.

[7] Quite the opposite, I claim that history of humanity has the traits of narcissi-epidemic. Psychoanalysts provided somewhat better theories on narcissism, and there is a number of them. For example, Freud speaks of libidal narcissism, Abraham speaks of destructive narcissism, Kohut speaks of healthy narcissism, and Millon speaks of four type of narcissism: unprincipled, amorous, compensatory, and elitist. See Theodore Millon, Disorders of Personality. DSM-IV and Beyond, Wiley and Sons, New York 1996, especially p. 393. In DSM-V, classification of narcissism as a psychic disorder is identified in the following manner: “A pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behaviour), need for admiration, and lack of empathy, beginning at early adulthood and present in a variety of context (…).” See American Psychiatric Association, DSM 5, London 2013, p. 669. Diagnostics consists of nine key points. I selected some of the more intriguing ones: a grandiose sense of self-importance (i.e. exaggerates achievements and talents, expects to be recognised as superior without commensature achievements); has a sense of entitlement (i.e. unreasonable expectations of especially favourable treatment of automatic compliance with his or her expectations); is interpersonally exploitative; lack empathy: is unwilling to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others.

[8] I devised the concept of the energy of openness and closeness inspired by the general hypothesis on openness and closeness proposed by Luka Perušić during a lecture at the international symposium “Rationality and the Problem of Evil”, held in Trogir from August 28 to September 3, and organized by the Croatian Dominican Province, Centre of Excellence for Integrative Bioethics (University of Zagreb), Ian Ramsey Centre for Science and Religion (University of Oxford), and Humane Philosophy Project. Perušić provided diachronic and synchronic synthesis of the approaches to the problem of evil, and has argued that the differences in understanding the problem of evil – thus the problem with solving it – comes from misunderstanding the manifestations of good and evil. They are emerging properties. More precisely, that they are in fact fully understandable through, and governed by, the higher relationship between openness (opening) as a phenomenon, and closeness (enclosing) as a phenomenon. By shifting the focus of discussion to the mechanism and structure of the coming-to-be of both good and evil, Perušić provided several examples of aporia solvable by this mechanism, including some classic issues such as the Kantian problem of “lying to the murderer at the door”.

[9] Dominant explanation on the purpose of fear is that it is a natural reaction to danger which developed through the process of evolution. Here, I focus more on the fear radicalized through the system of protection, an irrationality of self-love and self-indulgence which eventually grows into a threat to the being itself.

[10] Karl Gustav Jung [Carl Gustav Jung], Dinamika nesvesnog [Dynamics of Unconscious], Matica srpska, Beograd 1978, p. 96. More precisely, Jung thinks about cases of affective numbness that results from schizophrenia, but I claim that this can, in a much broader sense, be considered in contrast to being fully aware of the All-Oneness. In the second chapter of this paper I will provide more arguments for this claim.

[11] Augustine De Civ. 272. See Philip Schaff (ed.), St. Augustine’s City of God and Christian Doctrine, translated by Philip Schaff, Christian Literature Publishing Co., New York 1890, p. 437.

[12]Intentional unconscious is a term that was coined in collaboration with Luka Perušić. The goal was to find a suitable semantic image that explains the mereological agent of the action dynamics of both the unaware and aware subjects, of subjects that have no authentic understanding of the structure prior to the acts being undertaken, and whose mereological contribution is controlled by heterogeneity, but also of those who do yet cannot control this agency. They can be closely related to the social system of any particular ideology, but not necessarily – the processes are more fundamental than the meso-level of interaction, they can originate from within the beings without outside influence. This notion is somewhat complementary with the discussion regarding intentional unconsciousness and unconscious intentionality as found in phenomenological research and in the research of mind, for example by John R. Searle and Carl Gustav Jung. This requires a different study altogether and hereforth is only referenced.

[13] Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, translated by Robert B. Louden, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2006, p. 18.

[14] You will not find out the limits of the soul by going, even if you travel over every way, so deep is its report.” See Charles H. Kahn, The Art and Thought of Heraclitus. An edition of the fragments with translation and commentary, translated by Charles H. Kahn, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (MA) 1979, p. 45.

This paper discuses phenomena of evil through the works of Hannah Arendt and the crimes of the Nazi regime by identifying in our contemporary world a series of problems with evil which author analyses and defines as a contribution to a future inquiry into the problem of evil as a problem of human praxis. When Arendt writes on evil, she is encountered with a trial to one of the biggest Nazi criminals, Adolph Eichmann in Jerusalem; a trial which substantially influenced the theories of evil to this day. What it brings into the discourse is for the first time fully described evil as a problem of human consciousness, the inner dialogue as a contemplative nature of our being in the world. In the context in which Arendt encounters evil, it is described as banal, as evil that is done by men without any call to consciousness, and also as a deprivation of thought that aims only at mere execution of tasks where evil is global, but the sole act is individual. In other words, it is radical evil that happens with full assimilation of an individual into the system of production, bureaucratization, and industrialization, where mine self (the “I”) is subjected to the will of the process that itself remains unknown. In the contemporary situation, on which we will reflect and compare the theories of Arendt and her commentators, evil does not happen as assimilation but rather as a displacement from our everyday life. In that context, evil is incubated in the areas of worldly conflicts, and it witnesses itself through media representations. They create the topographies of evil, and with this creation they deprive us of the duty to think our own actions or to think them inside the framework of evil and good because our everyday life is deprived of the operators with which we could execute such thought process without falling into a discourse of conservative tones of some other form of selective tradition that do not fit the socio-political being of the world we live in, the world of technosphere. Evil has its solid foundations in metaphysics, and it surely governs the discussion of justice (social mystification of good), punishment (justified evil) and others, but that does not mean that evil, begins and ends in its categorical immovability out of the world of movable, the physical world. Evil is a fluctuating point of distress inside the freedom which we produced so we could get rid of it. In the moment in which we deal with our immediate past, it is necessary to “modernize” the thought of evil as a phenomenon that is the inevitable subject of every praxis that hopes to overcome the concrete injustice of our globally and historically taken situation of the spirit.Continua a leggere→